It was a depressing town, just the one long tedious street, with a few noisome lanes leading off at right-angles on either side, no sewage system, no public lamps, and no sort of amusement, not even a town hall. After sundown all became still as death, save for an odd shout from the interior of a pub. The townspeople used candles in their houses, and these were a penny each and therefore precious.
The monastery lay some distance outside the town, away by itself. It was a long rambling series of buildings of different date and no design. At six in the morning, at noon, and at six in the evening, a small door in the huge wrought iron gates would be opened, outside which was assembled a long string of the local poor, augmented by a few travelling tramps and tinkers. In the crowd would be many children. The whole thing was an astonishing pageant of destitution, real or assumed. In the morning, each person would be given a quartern loaf cut in two, a pat of butter, and a pint of scalding hot tea, which was taken away in an unbelievable variety of receptacles. At noon, each got a pint of soup with a platter of cooked meat and vegetables. In the evening, the menu was the same as in the morning.
A boy from the monastery had to be in attendance outside the gate at this performance to check the people—there were often more than a hundred of them—and to see that no enterprising pauper got more than was due. Old clothing was sometimes distributed, and boots of antique pattern, like boats, which I believe were actually imported for the purpose. In consequence of all this, the monks were popular and wielded great local power, which sometimes stretched so far as to collar a few of their more robust beneficiaries and make them work at harvesting, gathering hay, or the like. In those distant days, the downtrodden proletariat were downtrodden. Politically, they didn’t amount to a damn.
The monks lived under a president. About a dozen of them attended to our education, and the rest saw to the many jobs connected with the farms, meadows, grazing lands, the slaughter-* house, the saw-mill, the smithy, the dairy, and the bakery. A few of the senior monks looked after purely religious affairs, such as the conduct of matins, the ringing of bells, the vespers, prayers, and sermons. Bells rang nearly every hour, for one purpose or another. It was like any other monastery.
We boys took all our meals in a refectory. It was a long room with three tables running its length, and it would easily have taken twice the hundred boys who sat down there four times a day. The tablecloths were of coarse yellow linen, and all our mugs, plates, and saucers were decorated with pictures of a Hogarthian nature. The dinner plates were devoted to the Drunkard’s Fate, and often, while shoving aside an unwanted bit of mutton fat, I would disclose a view of this unhappy man being arrested by gentlemanly constables wearing side whiskers and tall hats, or find him standing on the scaffold, attended by a sleek ecclesiastic, about to expiate the misdeeds chronicled upon my neighbours’ plates. The entire colour scheme of this narrative was a muddy sepia.
At the top end of the refectory was a pulpit, and at each meal a boy would climb up in it and read, in a squeaky voice, without full stop or comma, extracts from Butler’s Lives of the Saints, while a ribald audience would pelt him surreptitiously with crusts and the odd mutton bone. If the Prefect was not looking, this hail became so fierce that the indignant Savonarola would disappear, voice and all, bringing the Prefect to the scene in a hurry, when he would discover silent, orderly rows of boys deeply concerned with their plates, and the reader struggling with his emotions.
There was a good deal of this reading. In the dormitory, after prayers and before bed, a boy had to read aloud some of the legends from St. Francis of Ligouri. These usually concerned rich and dissolute Florentine noblemen, one of whom turned towards God and renounced his evil life, while the other remained a sinner. As a rule the evildoer died first, appearing later to the reformed character festooned with chains and diffusing an aroma of sulphur. Other legends were of a ghostly character, and abounded in devils. All were nicely calculated to ensure a good night’s rest to an imaginative boy, who as a result was cither scared stiff of God and all His works, or took desperate refuge in derision.
But I must record and emphasise that, apart from these peculiarities, which were the custom at the time, we were well cared for both in mind and body. The monks believed in good food and lots of it, both for themselves and for us. We were plainly and plentifully fed with the best of homegrown produce. At dinner time, a light local beer was provided, with milk for the little chaps. The bread was excellent, both brown and white, and sometimes the attendant lay monk in the bakery would bake a little crusty loaf all for you alone, particularly if you were on duty at the daily distribution at the gates.
Of the monks who taught us, three remain in my memory. The first, and the worst, was a gaunt, mediaeval-looking creature, of inscrutable age, whom we called the Spectre. He had a dead-white face, with pale blue eyes that stared like a shark’s, an obtrusive little purple vein at either temple which swelled and throbbed when he was under stress of emotion, small yellow teeth that looked as if they had been ground down almost to the gum, and a square blue-shaven chin. He wore his hair close-cropped, not tonsured, but like a convict’s. His ears were thin and close to his head, and he had a pair of old woman’s hands, yellow and wrinkled, with the nails bitten down to the quick. Every time I saw those nails they gave me goose flesh. There was always a musty smell from him, his soutane, his biretta, and his sash always looked damp, even in the dryest weather, and his broad, flat, black sandals had never a warning squeak. He stands before me now as one of the most evil-looking creatures I have ever known. No human being I have ever seen or heard of, in life, in book, or in legend, has repelled me more. How on earth he was ever admitted, how on earth his colleagues tolerated him, I have never been able to fathom. His whole presence exuded something we boys could not even faintly understand, but yet were aware of. We had a sickening horror of him. Even now, he appears occasionally in my worst dreams.
He owed his name to his silence, and to a disconcerting way of appearing in a place rather than of coming to it. On the stone steps from basement to dormitory, at twilight, you could often discern him in the shadows of a cold landing, his back to you, gazing from the tall window at some icy vision of his own beyond the distant hills. In dark corridors, in dubious corners, in the ever-perspiring lavatories, he would appear and scare a wandering small boy silly, with his tall, silent person and his corpse-like face. He was always alone. No monk or boy was ever seen with him, save for a brief moment on business. I never saw him in normal human converse with anybody. His voice had a curious husky quality, almost a hiss, and before he spoke he would draw in a great breath through those clenched yellow teeth.
In a wired-in compound at the top of the playground we boys kept a heron which we had somehow snared on the river bank. The bird lived in a state of dismal resignation, grossly overfed, and glacially unresponsive to our overtures. Many a time I watched the Spectre gazing at this silent bird. There he would stand, with heaven knows what struggling in his mind, motionless as the bird.
We seldom saw the Spectre by day, and often wondered why this was, until one day a particular friend of mine discovered the reason. Underneath the refectory lay a number of cellars, opening off a stone-flagged corridor, which was cold and draughty at all times of the year. Jimmy, my friend, went down this dark place one afternoon on tiptoe, carrying his lantern, of which he was extremely proud, and which as usual went out. At the far end of the corridor was a barred gate, the iron bars encrusted with something white, like frost. Jimmy peeped in, and by craning his neck could see another cell beyond, lit by a few dim stinking tallow candles. In the middle of this cell was a huge granite block, and on the block was half a pig’s carcase, pink and unholy. Bending over this was the Spectre, scrunching wet heavy salt into the flesh with a square stone which he held by an iron ring. Another lay monk, a bullet-headed chap of the peasant type, stood by and slung handfuls of salt on the flesh with curious skill, while the Spectre sloshed away, scrunch, swish, scrunch, swish.
It was appalling. We could not relish our bacon for a long time, once we knew that the Spectre made it for us.
It was at night that the Spectre came among us. He was often Prefect of the study hall, and his job was to stand up on the rostrum behind a yellow prie-dieu and look down on a hundred boys at their work. His eyes never blinked, and he seemed to be looking straight at each one of us. He never fingered the large wooden rosary which hung at his side, as another monk would have done, but just stood there, unmoving, stark, and forbidding.
I only had two personal encounters with the Spectre. The first was on a thundery autumn evening. I had been playing handball, and, getting tired of it, I decided to go to the library and see if I could get the current Boys’ Own Paper. I was deeply interested in the adventures of a body of scholars who were adrift on the Pacific upon a colossal raft, under the suzerainty of a god-like tutor—the author of this engrossing narrative being, of course, Jules Verne.
When I reached the library door, some indefinite thing made me hesitate. I opened the door softly, peered round, and was at once grasped in a clutch as slimy and merciless as that of an octopus, and lifted off the ground. With indescribable terror I wriggled madly, I kicked and screamed. Twisting my head round, I saw a few inches from it the distorted, glaring face of the Spectre, labouring under some frightful stress.
I screamed louder than ever, and it was well for me that I did. He hissed into my face, “By God, boy, one word out of you, now or ever, and I’ll——” and let me go.
I tore past him and out of the door, fled to my dormitory, and vomited. Presently I was found there by a monk who had been sent to look for me. Not one word could he or anyone else drag from me as to what had happened. I was so scared of the Spectre’s threat that not even torture would have made me speak. At nights, during study time, I dared not raise my eyes from my book, afraid I should see him looking at me. For weeks I felt soiled and hurt and ruffled.
I feared this new aspect of him far more than his pitiless severity in the study room. He was a plague and terror to all of us, except a few of the older and stronger boys. Merciless to mark misdeeds, he would thrash us savagely for the least offence. His tyranny became so intolerable that, under the influence of Nick Carter, the favourite hero of our penny bloods, half a dozen of us banded ourselves into a Camorra, the sole object of which was to destroy the Spectre. We invented a secret language, written in a queer and innocent code. We held meetings in our dormitory at night, and Jimmy acquired half a dinner knife one evening, and announced to us that his lantern was now functioning perfectly. Many a plot we hatched, and many a time we had the Spectre assassinated on paper, but beyond the depiction of a skull and cross bones on his blackboard, with the ominous caption BEWARE, nothing came of our plots, and the society dissolved.
I have said nothing so far about my friends. Jimmy Brady, the owner of the lantern, sat at the desk next to me. He was my best friend. He was fair-haired, had blue eyes, very large hands, and walked with a queer shambling gait. He had a wonderful head for mathematics, and sped through the mysteries of Euclid with enviable ease: but at languages he was hopeless. Grammar and history induced in him a torpor of the mind from which neither persuasion nor punishment could rouse him. He could never remember his Bible history, and his efforts at original composition were frightful.
So our friendship was born of necessity. We swapped our talents and survived. I am hopeless at figures, but I could tackle the languages all right, my original compositions were at least original, and by doing each other’s work Jimmy and I got along. He was gentle, rather ineffective, a faltering, tepid sort of boy. His mother doted on him, and destined him for the priesthood, but he ended his days a mildly querulous grocer, leaving eight thousand pounds for his heirs to squander.
On the other side of Jimmy sat Tom Boylan, remarkable only for a trick of rolling up either of his ears into a ball and stuffing it into its own orifice, a feat I have never seen elsewhere. After him came Frank Parker, a tall and gawky boy who, before he left. “School, actually wrote and was paid twenty-three pounds for a boys’ serial adventure story. He shared a desk with Frankie Hogan, who of us all suffered most from the Spectre. Frank Parker was a most amazing dunce with no memory at all, and Frankie degenerated in a year from a bright, irresponsible child into a shuffling evasive little criminal.
Frankie’s father followed the sea, in what capacity I’ve forgotten, and the boy loved ships and sailors. He electrified us all once by making a little barque which he subsequently displayed in a green bottle. It was fully rigged and, I don’t know why, in its frail and hopeless impassivity, it suggested to me the Sleeping Beauty.
We all liked Frankie at first, but as he fell more and more under the blight of the Spectre, we began to fear him as an agent provocateur, or an informer. Still, even to the end, he had an imagination which could keep us spellbound. In the dormitory, after lights were out, he often would outline his future. He was going to be a Pirate. We laughed incredulously, but there was a conviction in his voice, a strange burning quality which made us uneasy in spite of ourselves. He had one golden plan which he told us over and over again. He would come back with a party of his followers, sack the tuck shop, release his immediate friends, hang the Spectre in the midst of the Study Hall, and set fire to the whole academy.
We loved to hear this story, though we laughed at it. I wonder if our laughter had any share in bringing about the end. For Frankie realised his ambition, or very near it. At the age of nineteen he was hanged at Monte Video for mutiny and murder on the high seas. I wonder if he gave a thought to his old school friends, or to the Spectre, when he stood on that South American scaffold. I am not vindictive, and I have seen too much to be cocksure in connecting cause and effect, but I lay Frankie’s downfall at the Spectre’s door. I am convinced he ruined that boy in body and mind. He exercised on him the most subtle and calculated cruelty. My own sufferings were bad enough. It takes a good deal to make boys pray for a man’s death, but many of us said entire rosaries and litanies to encompass the removal of the Spectre, and the failure of the Almighty to respond gave me my first real spasm of doubt.
Another of our little gang, by name Joe Kennedy, would come back each term dressed in a new suit of showy black cloth. I remember the look of this material perfectly, for it had a queer knack of falling to pieces if it was cut in a certain way. Obviously it was never intended for suitings. It may have been meant for upholstering the interior of carriages, and I incline to the view that Joe’s father had acquired a bale or two of it cheap by reason of his trade. The suit seemed always a size too small for Joe, and after the first month two saucer-like holes would appear at the shoulder blades. Joe was a fat, good-humoured little chap with curly hair. He was very fond of food, and devoted to frogs, of which he always had a few in his desk. This devotion, however, received a check one evening, when the spectacle of an elderly obese frog panting indignantly on the Prefect’s prie-dieu caused an enquiry to be made and brought an embargo on Joe’s practice. Joe, undaunted, transferred his attention to tadpoles, and finally coaxed an enormous jam-jar out of the lay brother in charge of the kitchen. In this he kept a newt, and, by dint of providing it with quantities of fresh worms daily, reared it to the proportions of a young crocodile. What size it would have reached we could not guess, for the Easter holiday came along and, since he could not transport it, Joe had sorrowfully to release it in an adjoining pond.
But I must not be tempted into an inventory of my classmates. There remain two whom I must mention because of the part they played. One was named Boardman, an American, whom we all called the Yank. He was not the only American we had, but he was the oldest and the most conspicuous. Some of the Brothers even treated him as a friend and an equal. It seemed to me that he was a fully grown man. He smoked openly, was well-to-do, dressed in a rather bizarre Wild-West fashion, and possessed, though he seldom wore, a grey sombrero. We small boys held him in great awe.
At the other end of the town, some di
stance from us, on the slope of a hill, stood a convent. This, like ourselves, had a school, for eighty or ninety girls. Those of the nuns who were not engaged in looking after the girls supplied the church music. They frequently provided a good string orchestra, and I owe them my first acquaintance with music. I had regular access to the convent, for it was my task often to go for fresh supplies of Communion bread, which was made by the nuns.
One day the Yank sent for me. He had a comfortable room of his own, the walls of which were decorated with flamboyant pictures of prize fighters and race horses, an engraving of Custer’s last stand, another of Sitting Bull smoking, a fowling piece, two trout rods, and a flashy picture of a lady of ample proportions dressed in pink. Her legs were covered with a visiting card, so I suspect she was wearing tights.
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